ord, happily interposed, reaching to the inmost soul,
may "take away the heart of stone, and introduce a heart of flesh."
And, if an individual may be thus changed, then his children, and his
connections, to the latest page of unborn history.

This is the true glory of man, that "one generation doth not pass away,
and another come, velut unda supervenit undam;" but that we leave our
improvements behind us. What infinite ages of refinement on refinement,
and ingenuity on ingenuity, seem each to have contributed its quota, to
make up the accommodations of every day of civilised man; his table,
his chair, the bed he lies on, the food he eats, the garments that cover
him! It has often been said, that the four quarters of the world are
put under contribution, to provide the most moderate table. To this
what mills, what looms, what machinery of a thousand denominations, what
ship-building, what navigation, what fleets are required! Man seems
to have been sent into the world a naked, forked, helpless animal, on
purpose to call forth his ingenuity to supply the accommodations that
may conduce to his well-being. The saying, that "there is nothing new
under the sun," could never have been struck out, but in one of the two
extreme states of man, by the naked savage, or by the highly civilised
beings among whom the perfection of refinement has produced an
artificial feeling of uniformity.

The thing most obviously calculated to impress us with a sense of the
power, and the comparative sublimity of man, is, if we could make a
voyage of some duration in a balloon, over a considerable tract of the
cultivated and the desert parts of the earth. A brute can scarcely move
a stone out of his way, if it has fallen upon the couch where he would
repose. But man cultivates fields, and plants gardens; he constructs
parks and canals; he turns the course of rivers, and stretches vast
artificial moles into the sea; he levels mountains, and builds a bridge,
joining in giddy height one segment of the Alps to another; lastly, he
founds castles, and churches, and towers, and distributes mighty cities
at his pleasure over the face of the globe. "The first earth has passed
away, and another earth has come; and all things are made new."

It is true, that the basest treacheries, the most atrocious cruelties,
butcheries, massacres, violations of all the restraints of decency, and
all the ties of nature, fields covered with dead bodies, and flooded
with h